I have had two WordPress blogs hacked into in the past. That was at a time when I was doing very little internet marketing, and until I found time to address the situation (months later), these sites were penalised in the search engines. They were not removed, but the rankings were reduced.
I back up my blogs frequently using a plugin WP DB Backup. I will always restore my blog to the 13, if anything happens. I use my site to be scanned by WP Security Scan plugin that is free frequently and requests that are suspicious-looking to be blocked by WordPress Firewall to fix hacked wordpress database.
Do not depend on your internet host - Many people depend on their web host to"do all that technical stuff for me", not realizing that sometimes, they don't! Far better why not try these out to have the responsibility lie with you, rather than out of your control.
Yes, you need to do regular backups of your website. I recommend at least a weekly database backup and a monthly "full" backup. More. Definitely if you make frequent additions and changes to your website. If you make changes multiple times a day, or have a community of people that are in there all the time, a daily backup should be a minimum.
You can also create a firewall that blocks hackers. The hacker is prevented by the firewall from coming to your his comment is here own files. You also have read to have updated version of Apache. Upgrade your PHP. It is important that your system is always filled with upgrades.
There is another problem you have with WordPress. People always know additionally they could drop by your login form and where they can login and try a different combination of user accounts and passwords outside. In order to stop this from happening you want to set up Login Lockdown. It is a plugin that lets users try and login with a wrong password three times. Following that the IP address will be banned from the server for a specific amount of time.